


Problems Borrowed From the Future

by Tarrinatopaz



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Hurt Mick Rory, Leonard Snart Lives, M/M, Not Beta Read, Protective Leonard Snart, Sorry Not Sorry, Time Travel, not much comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 05:54:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17677691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tarrinatopaz/pseuds/Tarrinatopaz
Summary: It wasn't the heist that went wrong, it was what came after. And what came after made very little sense. It would, in fact, be years before it would.





	Problems Borrowed From the Future

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes when you listen to the same angsty song on repeat for hours things like this happen.
> 
> Unbetaed.

~Fall 1999~

“Mick!” Len called softly. He wanted to yell for his partner but he wasn’t sure if there was still anyone unwelcome in the area or not.

Len found the safehouse trashed when he returned from leaving their ill gotten gains with his fence. He and Mick had split up after the heist, Len peeling off with the jewels on one direction, Mick causing a distraction so Len could get away with the loot in another. Mick getting back to the safehouse shouldn’t have been a problem. He thought his partner would be safe, but apparently he had been wrong.

Len stepped over a body in the front hallway, dressed in body armor that looks like someone got lost on their way to a Star Wars convention. Decidedly not Mick, which was reassuring to a certain extent, though he didn’t know how many people had encroached into their territory.

“Mick!” He hissed again, not liking the bloody handprint on the wall further down the hallway. The lack of answer was serving only to ramp up his anxiety.

There was the body of a second armored man in the living room and still no sign of Mick. 

Len closed his eyes and stood still, listening, attuning himself to the sounds of the safehouse, trying to hear anything that wasn’t the normal ambient noise. There. A soft scuffle in the direction of the kitchen.

Len went. Quickly but cautiously. There was more blood on the floor as he got closer. Streaks and splatters, like someone had fallen and half dragged themself through there, never making it fully back to their feet.

Len’s stomach twisted uneasily at the sight.

He took a step around the corner only to leap backwards behind the cover of the door frame as a gunshot rang out and a bullet blew by and took a chunk out of the drywall. 

“Mick!” he cried, hoping that it was him and not more of the attackers still lingering.

When no second shot came Len risked leaning around the corner again.

Mick sat on the floor on the far side of the kitchen, tucked against the corner cabinets. He still held the gun in one trembling hand, elbow locked to keep his arm straight. The other hand pressed a bloody dish towel to a wound low on his belly.

“Mick!” Len surged forward across the room. He plucked the gun from his partner's shaking hand as Mick began to let it fall. Len reengaged the safety and tucked it quickly into his waistband with his own handgun.

Mick let his head tip back against the cabinet door with a hollow thump. “Think I got ‘em all, Len,” he said entirely too breathlessly for Len’s taste. 

“I think they got you pretty good too,” he intoned as he sank to his knees. He wrapped gentle fingers around Mick's bloody hand that held the towel. “Let me see.”

Mick’s fingers tightened on the towel automatically. 

“I've got you. Let me see,” Len repeated. “Just let me see.”

Mick relaxed under Len's hands.

Len slowly peeled the cloth back. “God, Mick,” he breathed. 

The wound was small and strangely singed looking around the edges. Len had seen a veritable smorgasbord of injuries in his life, but none like this one. But even though it was strange to him he could easily tell that it was bad. There was so much blood for such a small wound. That stirred a cold fear inside him.

Len pressed the towel back down hard.

Mick gasped in pain and gritted his teeth. 

“We need to get you to a hospital.” Len hated every word of the statement. Hospitals had never done either of them any favors.

“No. Gonna be looking for us.” Mick wheezed.

“I think getting attacked in your own home sounds like a pretty good alibi.”

Mick coughed and spat blood. He shook his head. “Len, no.”

“A backroom doc can’t fix this shit.”

“Not what a meant, boss, though you may be right about that.”

Len froze. It must be bad for Mick to admit that he might agree about needing the hospital. He swallowed hard but decided to focus on the other part of what Mick had said. “What _do_ you mean?”

Mick swallowed around blood. “These people. Don’t know where the fuck these sci-fi assholes came from, but I got a bad-” he cut himself off in a fit of coughing. More blood smeared across his lips. “Got a bad feeling,” he finished finally.

Len nodded. He had a bad feeling himself. He needed to get Mick out of there before anyone else showed up.

“Gonna keep tryin’ til we’re in the ground.” He tried to take a deep breath but ended up coughing again. “Think I might be halfway there already.”

“Shut up, Mick. Stop talking.” Len growled more forcefully than he really meant. “Save your strength.”

Len dug into his pocket for the cell phone that he’d procured only a few weeks before. He thumbed out 9-1-1, but hesitated to hit the send button. This was the slums, not a high priority for any type of emergency support, be it ambulance or a fire crew or the goddamn pigs. There was no guarantee that the dispatcher would even send help to Central’s seedy underbelly. Stranger things had happened. He would get Mick to a hospital faster if he drove him there himself.

Len shoved the bulky phone back into his coat pocket with a growl. “Come on, Mick, we're going.” He shifted in closer to the injured man. He pulled Mick's arm across his shoulders and wrapped his own arm around Mick's torso. “You gotta help me Mick. Gotta get you out of here.”

Len had always been smaller and skinnier than Mick, no matter how much his partner tried to remedy it--too many skipped meals during his formative years. This fact would do him no favors now.

“Come on. We're gonna get up on three, alright?”

“Pretty sure you should just leave me.” Mick breathed through his teeth.

“That is not going to happen, Mick.” Len said tightly. “Let's go. One, two, three,” he lifted, taking as much of his friend's weight as he could.

Mick did some scrambling, his left foot slid in blood, but finally got his feet under himself enough to help Len get him to his feet. He whimpered as the movement pulled at the wound. 

“Let's get out of here.” Mick whispered. 

“Sure thing.” Len nodded and began navigating them through the safehouse, around bodies and broken furniture. As they went Mick seemed to get heavier, Len was taking more of his weight. He glanced down and found the Mick was barely putting any pressure on the wound anymore. A problem to be sure, but not one Len could do much about until they made it to the car. “Pressure,” he reminded, the best he could do for the moment.

Mick gave an inarticulate moan.

The step down to the driveway was tricky and Mick's growing lack of balance nearly took them both down.

“Mick!” Len barked, trying to get him to focus. “Come on, just a little further.”

He was so focused on Mick that he failed to notice the figure stepping off the street until the figure spoke.

“Luck’s run out boys.”

Len's head snapped towards the sound.

There was a man standing on the bare ground that passed for a yard in this part of Central, at least Len thought it was a man though the bulky body armor and modulated voice made it impossible to tell.

“What the fuck?” Mick asked weakly. 

Len pulled one of the handguns from his waistband and pointed it at the intruder. “Got no quarrel with you,” he warned. He knew his hand was shaking and he doubted his accuracy if he was to shoot.

“Not yet. But I'm gonna end it before it can even start.”

What did that mean? Len wanted to know but he wasn't going to making himself look so curious as to ask. Didn’t have time for that and he told the figure as much.

“Time!” The armored figure barked a laugh. “You have no idea. I'll set the timeline back to right by removing you both from it,” he growled. He raised his own weapon, a gun that would look just as at home in a bad sci-fi movie as the rest of the ensemble. 

Len fired, but as expected his shot went wide. All he succeeded in was breaking the window out of a car parked further down the block.

“The Time Masters send their regards.” Even through the modulation the smirk in the figure's tone was clearly evident.

Len fully expected to die on the cracked driveway of the grubby safehouse. 

Probably would have if not for the streak of lightning that shot down the street. It didn't so much strike his attacker as disappear him in the space of time it took Len to blink.

Len released a breath that he didn't realize he'd been holding. He swore aloud. What the hell had just happened? Not only the strange man, but the blur of lightning too. Not that he was particularly good with anything having to do with science but he _knew_ that lightning didn't normally do that.

The line of thought was cut off when Mick went limp. The weight of him dragged Len down. He swore again, even more colorfully. This wouldn’t do. An unresponsive Mick would be nearly impossible for him to get into the beat up old car.

“Mick!” he cried. “Wake up!” He shook his partner but the other man didn't move. “Mick!”

But Mick didn't stir. The blood that stained his shirt had spread worryingly all the way down the front of him.

Len ran a hand over his head, blunt fingernails digging into his scalp.

Something crackled in the air. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

As he looked up the lightning came back down the street. He froze as it changed direction and surged towards him and Mick. 

A blur of red raced around him before Mick disappeared from the driveway the same way the stranger had.

An inarticulate and panicked cry tore itself from him because his partner was gone. His possibly dying partner was _gone_. His already adrenaline fueled heart tripped even faster.

When the static feeling rose in the air again Len took a breath and prepared for death again.

The blur was there again and then suddenly he was moving with the red blur. The _man shaped_ blur he realized now that he was pressed up against it. 

And as suddenly as it began it was over. Len stumbled as he tried to regain control over his momentum. He thought briefly that he might be sick.

He looked around quickly to get his bearings and found that he was at the hospital. And Mick was there! They had him on a gurney and the medical staff was swarming around him. Len nearly sobbed in relief. They would take care of Mick, any other complications could be sorted out later.

He just really wished he knew what had just happened.

***

It was a few months after Mick had finally recovered enough to be released from the hospital--it had been bad and the doctors still couldn't agree on what had caused the wound--that Len heard of a vaguely similar incident. 

Said incident involved a murder and a child that disagreed with what the evidence supposedly said. At the time he honestly didn't think much of it--a boy coping badly with the fact of his father killing his mother--but looking back he should have considered it further. After meeting Doc Allen during one of his stints in Iron Heights Len was inclined to believe he was innocent of what he was accused of.

It wasn't until about fifteen years later that things began to really come into focus. 

The Streak was what the internet called the ‘phenomenon’ in the early days. 

He though, didn't hear of it until it interrupted his heist of the Kandaq Dynasty Diamond. It was such a good plan too until the red blur assaulted his crew and knocked Len to the ground. He'd made the rookie mistake of taking his mask off in his surprise. 

The stolen security footage confirmed what he'd known all along. That ‘the streak’ was a man. 

Though perhaps not as fast as he remembered. Len's ‘testing’ of his new toy confirmed that. Oh the cold gun was a thing of beauty.

And, though not his element, the heat gun that he'd procured for Mick was quite nice as well. The perfect peace offering to get back into the good graces of his pyromaniac husband.

Mick had the nerve to call Len ‘obsessed’ with the Flash, as the speedster came to be called. Well pardon him if he was curious about exactly what the fuck was going on in his city.

And it turned out that the Flash was the same Barry Allen kid that claimed that a ‘man in the lightning’ had murdered his mother. Len did not believe in coincidence. 

But no matter how he twisted things around in his head he couldn't make it make sense. Well without time travel of course, but that was crazy even with the weirdness that was Central’s new normal.

Turns out it wasn't crazy, because a man came from the future and called the rag tag group he'd assembled ‘Legends’. Real, actual time travel was on the table. Like Len wasn't going to jump at the chance to do that. Maybe he could come to understand what had happened that fall night all those years ago.

He watched and listened and learned and things went to hell and back. Time travel, it turned out, was nowhere near as fun as it looked on TV. Time travel was a pit of vipers biding it's time to bite you in the ass when you're the most vulnerable. 

And Len reached what he thought would be the end of the line. He supposed he now knew why the bounty hunter had been so angry, and why ‘ _the Time Masters send their regards_.’ 

The explosion was unpleasant and left him feeling like he'd spent entirely too much time in the sun when it spat him out, years after the event had actually happened. 

It took far too long, in his opinion, for the team--for Mick--to find him. Len probably would have given his husband more shit about that if he hadn't looked at Len like he was an answered prayer.

So Mick took a break. Some time for them to reconnect, lay low in Central--at home--for a while.

When the scar on Mick's belly opened up and started bleeding, Len knew the signs, knew what was happening. He placed a phone call to one Barry Allen. 

“Scarlet, I know it's late but I'm going to need a favor. How would you feel about closing a time loop?”


End file.
